Without knowing exactly which cable box you have (each company has one or more preferred boxes). You could use an analog method and video capture device to pass the files to the Mac.

I can't say for sure but I doubt that you can just drag and drop the files from the box to the Time Capsule. The USB ports on some boxes are "service ports only and would not accept a hard drive. On other boxes the port will accept a hard drive but you have no way of controlling which programs are on the original DVDR drive and which are on the external hard drive. On the boxes I've seen that have this feature the external drive is essentially seen as an extension of the existing DVR drive and isn't intended to be read directly by the computer.

There are some boxes that have firewire ports that can be used to connect to the Mac and transfer files. The ports may/may not be active. Here again the process involves playing the file in real time while the computer is connected to the box. One hour of video would take an hour to transfer. The files are often in .m2t format and often have to be transcoded to a more usable format. There is also the possibility that the file will not transfer/transcode properly due to copyright restrictions.

Hi Slydude - I've been struggling w/ these DVRs for a number of years - now on my 3rd Time Warner DVR cable box (all Scientific Atlanta - DL manuals to all) - I'd first have to agree that there really is no way to attach these devices to a computer and analyze their file formats for transfer of data, such as movies recorded - maybe in the future or possibly a 'trick' that I'm missing - don't know, BUT I've not figured it out yet.

What I've done for 4-5 years is to use a stand-alone Sony DVD burner (on my 2nd model shown below - not cheap), but I've burned to DVD-R over 500 films off my DVR - process is tedious in that the DVR is attached to the Sony device via composite AV cables and has to be played in 'real time' - now it does work, though! There are SD card inputs but these only go in one direction, i.e. SD card to DVD - now if only they could go the other way (or if there is a similar device that would 'burn' to SD cards) - if so, then there is a solution (or several).

I also own an AirStash device (also shown below) - this accepts SD cards (even of large capacity) and sets up a personal Wi-Fi network; there is a free app for the iPad which allows easy transfer of photos/music/movies from the SD card to the iPad - NOW - only to figure out how to get the movies off the DVR to SD cards? Intriguing I must say - Dave